At the Mountains of Madness

At the Mountains of Madness
2013-2015

At the Mountains of Madness began as a long scroll landscape drawing, in the tradition of ancient Chinese painting, but done today. There is no more ink on silk but sheets of drawing paper glued together. There are no more poems to nature but dreams of nature, or artificial natural history. Our works of art, our dreams are the landscape. At the Mountains of Madness is also one of the most famous works by H.P. Lovecraft. I wasn’t trying to be influenced by his images; it is something else about this work that appealed to me, that I tried to achieve with my drawing. An unknown world was discovered.

What was before, the history, the natural history, only reveals fragments, remains, they can be interpreted in so many ways. It is like the literary works from the ancient Greeks, the closest we have from another civilization so alien from ours. We can only speculate, we really don’t know. We can’t possibly understand a world so foreign to us. Those images are gone. Irrecoverable. But we can imagine them, going somewhere else, to some uncertain future; by going back.

Between 2013 and 2015 I worked on a long scroll landscape drawing, inventing that world, those scenes that could happen in ancient times, or in a distant planet, millions of years ahead of us. That inspired me to continue working on further drawings. Fragments, vignettes, expanding this vision. I selected 10 of them, together with the long scroll landscape drawing, combined into a volume as an artbook, and published it in a limited edition of 200 copies in 2016 via my imprint ENTERTAINING VIOLENCE.

The End of Summer, 2026